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Develop a Frontline Defense for Food Safety through Staff Training and Education

Quality indicator survey (QIS) was implemented to ensure improvement of overall quality of life for persons, consumers that receive services through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). All providers are required to have policies, procedures and processes that serve to enforce standards of operation offering continual improvement in healthcare settings, with a goal of empowering staff. Your staff’s (frontline) education and training programs should specifically target: §483.60 food and nutrition services, §482.28 (hospital) food and dietetic services, §483.60 food and nutrition service, and behavioral health services (November 2019).

The §483.60 regulation from CMS under staffing states, “The facility must employ sufficient staff with the appropriate competencies and skills sets (training) to carry out the functions of the food and nutrition service, taking into consideration resident assessments, individual plans of care and the number, acuity and diagnoses of the facility’s resident population in accordance with the ‘facility-wide assessment’”.

This session will focus on developing documentation to deploy your organization’s, department’s vision, mission and messaging. It will help in shaping your training, and corrective action of your staff, and individual’s food handler’s behaviors around Institute of Medicine Study. Further, it will help you build your food and nutrition staff and individuals, and volunteers with roles within your organization’s food service frontline. You will be able to apply the knowledge from this session and reduce the risk of foodborne outbreaks.

The session will also discuss basic risk management strategies to ensure compliance with appropriate competencies and skills sets (training). You will learn about the tools to convey, measure and capture appropriate competencies and skills sets (training), as well as the effective means of correcting poor food handling behaviors, with actual training programs, methods and tools.

Session Objectives

This session will cover:

How training managers can implement staff training with tools within the department and across facility

Importance of your team’s and partner’s buy-in, to understanding and reducing risk

Session Highlights

This session will cover:

Healthcare frontline food safety education, training and tools

Actual dietary/food service department training programs, tools (word format) that can be customized to your organization

Additional online sources frontline healthcare tools, methods

Tools, forms and checklists to build your frontline staff

How to develop managers, frontline staff that understand what it means to “building a frontline defense” and to have a "deficiency-free survey”

Who Should Attend

Hospital directors and long term care administrators, who want to develop customized training programs, want better delivery of content to frontline staff, axillary departments with a focus on building a culture of food safety and food safety planning

Axillary departments, staff, activities, nursing department managers, supervisors, other departments that indirectly serve food and beverage, who need to know service standards, regulations but want a better, more comprehensive understanding of how to put in place food service, food safety plans, to better offer education, training of staff and volunteers

Behavioral health services organizations (November 2019) that want to get a jump on implementing food and nutrition service guidelines required in Phase 3: All Phase 1 and 2, and the requirements that need more time to implement (personnel hiring and training, implementation of systems approaches to quality) (November 28, 2019)